Abstract
We surveyed 100 Italian defense attorneys about their knowledge and beliefs about factors affecting eyewitness accuracy. The results of similar surveys show that U.S. defense attorneys were significantly more knowledgeable than other legal professionals, including U.S. prosecutors and U.S. and European judges. The present survey of Italian defense attorneys produced similar results. However, the results suggest that the defense attorney’s superior performance may be due at least in part to their skepticism of eyewitness testimony rather than their greater knowledge of eyewitness factors.
Highlights
There is a growing concern among eyewitness researchers that legal professionals lack sufficient knowledge about memory and the many factors that may affect eyewitness accuracy to prevent wrongful convictions from eyewitness error (Benton et al, 2007; Wise et al, 2007)
The responses of the Italian defense attorneys are more similar to the responses of the U.S defense attorneys than to the responses of the US prosecutors and US and Norwegian judges
The overall score of the Italian defense attorneys was 71% correct, which is somewhat lower than the score of the U.S defense attorneys (79%), but higher than the scores of U.S prosecutors (46%) U.S judges (57%), Norwegian judges (66%), and Norwegian lay persons with jury experience (53%) to the same questions in previous surveys (Wise and Safer, 2004; Magnussen et al, 2008, 2010; Wise et al, 2009)
Summary
There is a growing concern among eyewitness researchers that legal professionals lack sufficient knowledge about memory and the many factors that may affect eyewitness accuracy to prevent wrongful convictions from eyewitness error (Benton et al, 2007; Wise et al, 2007). The list of historical and contemporary examples of persons wrongfully convicted by eyewitness testimony is long . Two eyewitnesses who erroneously identified him as one of the bandits while he was in the waiting room of the magistrate who was hearing the case caused his wrongful conviction (Sporer et al, 1996). Another famous example of eyewitness error occurred 100 years later, in 1896, when a London court convicted Adolf Beck, a Norwegian citizen, for swindling women out of their jewelry after 12 of the victims erroneously identified him in a lineup. Many judges in Commonwealth countries still cite the case as a glaring example of the dangers of eyewitness testimony (Coates, 2001)
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